Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter’s The Promise, a look inside the Obama White House during the new president’s first year, is engrossing and often very revealing in unexpected ways. The president has a gratitude gap, for example, and Joe Biden as an irrepressible Labrador is not what many conservatives will expect from Alter. The book is fascinating on many levels, and Republicans especially should be reading it closely for clues to how the president will govern for the balance of this term.